DURING the Saturday, delegates had a choice of breakout sessions from Harbro, ANM Farm Profit, RBS and Soil Essentials, which all proved beneficial and thought-provoking. 
Jim Wilson headed up the Soil Essentials session, with a number of key points/take home messages including:

  • Keep up with the latest technology innovations and how can you use them in your business. Assess how mature a technology is and what you want to achieve from it before investing in it
  • Address the high value, low hanging fruit in your business first. For example, auto-steer can reduce fuel, machinery, wearing parts and labour costs 
  • Don’t be afraid to try new things in your business and personal life. Crop trials using precision agriculture can be a great way to see what works on your own farm
  • Make time to keep learning – training and support is essential to be able to use new tools and techniques efficiently
  • Consider paying for advice from well informed experts as you usually pay for free advice. Customer experience and references are often a good way to establish what is likely to work in your situation

Taking control of the Harbro session were Chris Baxter and David Mackenzie, who offered some take home messages of their own:

  • Improving efficiency starts with measuring and recording data on farm
  • Work with a team to set up key performance indicators and set high benchmarks. The main focus of improving efficiency is about focusing on the output from your business first and less about input costs.
  • Your team should include your Harbro specialist, your vet, in some cases your genetics supplier and your own farm team that sit down and discuss your results and the strategy to improve efficiency
  • Embrace technology that will create data from your farm – such as Qscan for beef, Qbox abbatoir analysis, Keenan PAC system and Harbro’s dairy monitor. Having new technology, however, is no excuse not to measure. Use information from kills sheets or weigh incoming lambs
  • Embrace nutritional developments like Maxammon and Rumitech which have been proven to improve efficiency, for example, recent Aberystwyth University independent studies showed Rumitech increased energy available to a ruminant and in turn will improve feed conversions by up to 10%
  • The ongoing process on farm should be to: measure, identify weak points with your partners, agree a new strategy for management, health, genetics and nutrition, invest, implement the changes, continue to measure and review the response based on data.